“International Communism and
Espionage” session, European Social Science History Conference March 2006,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

by John Earl Haynes and Harvey
Klehr

In
the 1940s, 1950s, and later a large segment of the American public assumed a
significant connection between the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) and Soviet
espionage.This view dominated public
and political discourse in the immediate post-World War II decades.After the 1960s public support for this
assumption declined but remained strong.Among scholars, however, Soviet espionage and American communism were
distinctly separate activities and linkage between the two was seen as weak or
nonexistent.As a consequence, there was
little overlap between the historiography of the two fields of study.This paper will review these separate
historiographic traditions and how in the late 1990s the two partially merged
and appear likely to remain linked for the foreseeable future.

The Historiography of Soviet
Espionage in the United States

Given
the intense public and governmental concern about Soviet espionage in the early
Cold War it is not surprising that a vast literature on the subject has
accumulated.What is surprising,
however, it that very little of it has been written by historians, political
scientist, or others trained in professional scholarship.Journalists, popular writers, and polemical
advocates produced most of the books and essays on Soviet espionage in America,
along with a considerable body of memoir and autobiographical writings by
people involved in espionage or internal security.[1]Some of this literature is highly useful and
insightful.A few example are: A
Generation on Trial: U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss (1960), a balanced and thorough
review of the Hiss-Chambers case by Alistair Cooke, a British journalist and
long-time observer of America; Whittaker Chambers’ darkly powerful
autobiography Witness (1952) regarding his role in Soviet espionage and
his relationship with Alger Hiss; Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field
(1950), journalist Flora Lewis’s remarkably discerning reconstruction of
Field’s strange journey from Soviet spy in the Department of State in
Washington to imprisonment in a Stalinist jail in Budapest as an American
superspy; and retired FBI agent Robert Lamphere’s The FBI-KGB War (1986)
revealing story of FBI counter-intelligence operations.[2]Nonetheless, little of this journalistic,
memoir, or advocacy literature, even at its best, held to scholarly standards
of documentation and analysis.

Prior
to the 1990s there were, in fact, few scholarly books on the history of Soviet
espionage.Many academics no doubt shied
away from the issue because of the scarcity of primary sources and sensationalistic
aspects of the topic.David Dallin’s Soviet
Espionage provided a thorough and judicious summary of what was known in
1955.Not himself an academic, Dallin’s
personal interest in Soviet espionage drew him to gather much of what was
publicly available into a Yale University Press book.But in the latter half of the 1960s an
increasingly hostile academic community dismissed Dallin’s book on the grounds
that most of his evidence consisted of the testimony of defectors and exiles
and the results of congressional and FBI investigations.Such evidence was increasingly distrusted,
and Dallin’s Menshevik past was taken as reason for skepticism as well.[3]

Herbert
Packer’s Ex-Communist Witnesses (1962) reflected the developing academic
consensus.He subjected the testimony of
leading defectors from Soviet espionage and the Communist Party to a skeptical
examination that assumed their testimony was suspect unless unimpeachable
documentary corroboration was readily available.Given the unavailability of Soviet
intelligence agency archives and his distrust for congressional committee and
FBI investigations, that standard disposed Packer to dismiss Elizabeth
Bentley’s testimony about several CPUSA-based networks of Soviet sources in the
U.S. government with the judgment: “no witness’s story is better calculated to
inspire mistrust or disbelief than Elizabeth Bentley’s.The extravagance of her claims about her
espionage contacts, the vagueness of her testimony about the content of the
secret material that she allegedly received, the absence of corroboration for
most of her story, and above all, her evasiveness as a witness, all combine to
raise serious doubts about her reliability.”David Caute was even less nuanced in The Great Fear: the
Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower; he painted Bentley as an
unbelievable liar.Professor Athan
Theoharis, a prolific and influential historian of the history of FBI internal
security operations, also summarily dismissed Bentley as “a disgruntled
ex-radical” and judged that her story was “unsubstantiated” and “lacked
credibility.”[4]

Neither
Theoharis nor Caute found the testimony of others defectors or the FBI’s
voluminous investigatory files any more persuasive about widespread Soviet
espionage.Caute judged concern about
espionage and communism in the early Cold War as nothing more than “hysteria”
and “collective delusion” and emphasized “there is no documentation in the
public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and
espionage during the entire postwar period.”[5]It was symptomatic of the dismissal of the
seriousness of Soviet espionage by scholars that Caute’s The Great Fear
and Theoharis’s many books on FBI operations were not really about Soviet
espionage.One does not write a history
of what one believes to have been largely mythical.Caute, Theoharis, and others, consequently,
wrote not about Soviet espionage but about McCarthyism and what
they regarded as manufactured anti-Communist panic about a non-existent link
between the American Communist party and Soviet espionage, with the latter
treated as insignificant in extent or importance.[6]

While
the overwhelming majority of academic books and essays on internal security and
communism minimized or dismissed Soviet espionage and either asserted or
implied that those accused of espionage were likely innocent, there were a few
that swam against the tide.Allen
Weinstein’s Perjury: the Hiss-Chambers Case (1978) and The Rosenberg
File (1983)by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton dealt with the two
highest profile espionage trials of the Cold War.[7]In the post-Watergate world, with Richard
Nixon, Hiss’s nemesis and a leading political anti-Communist, disgraced and the
FBI under attack for illegal activities, the belief that Hiss and the
Rosenbergs had been framed hardened in academic writing and spread into the
broader culture, particularly among the cultural elite and the media.But Weinstein and Radosh and Milton presented
thorough examinations of the evidence, both the original trial testimony and
later releases of massive FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act, which
confirmed their subjects’ guilt.Both
books withstood angry assaults: there were hostile reviews, nit-picking of
details, sweeping (and undocumented) claims that FBI files could not be
trusted, and lawyerly arguments that certain damning evidence, even though
true, should not have been admitted into evidence under this or that esoteric
rule of criminal trial procedures or that prosecutorial misconduct should void
the convictions even if the accused were guilty.Notably, however, no scholars produced a
comprehensive response to either book.No historian went over the huge body of evidence that Weinstein, Radosh,
and Milton reviewed and wrote a scholarly book setting out the case for the
innocence of Alger Hiss or Julius Rosenberg.[8]

While
Perjury and The Rosenberg File made an impression on the
scholarly world, each focused on a single case.Even though a logical conclusion was that Soviet espionage might have
been more serious than the prevailing consensus, its full scope remained
shrouded.And, despite the lack of
competing comprehensive scholarly books taking a contrary stance, a
still-significant number of historians continued to insist that Julius
Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were innocent.Nor did the two books stimulate other professional historians to a
greater interest in studying the history of Soviet espionage.Despite her central role in persuading the
American public that Soviet spies had thoroughly penetrated the government,
there was no scholarly biography of Bentley.Nor did scholars produce an in depth study of the defector Louis Budenz,
the convicted spies Jack Soble and Judith Coplon, the complex Amerasia
affair, or the Gouzenko case in Canada with its American implications.No historian attempted to update Dallin’s
1955 survey of Soviet espionage.Prior
to the 1990s and the collapse of Soviet communism, writing about the history of
Soviet espionage in America in the Stalin era remained largely the province of
journalists, popular writers, and memoirists.The prevailing academic consensus at the end of the 1980s, while shaken
by Perjury and The Rosenberg File, remained committed to a
minimalist view of Soviet espionage and saw little involvement by the
CPUSA.The entirely separate
historiography of the American Communist movement sustained and supported this
belief.

The Historiography of the
American Communist Movement

Pride
of place as the first scholarly/academic treatment of American communism
belongs to Gordon S. Watkins of the University of Illinois for his essay,
“Revolutionary Communism in the United States” that appeared in 1920.Watkins presented a narrative of the split of
the “Left Wing” from the Socialist Party in 1918-19 and the founding of the
Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party in 1919 as the Left
Wing itself split into competing factions.It was a thorough survey based on a close reading of the radical press
as well as the leaflets, statements, and proclamations put out by the various
groups and individuals involved.Given
that the events covered had occurred only one or two years earlier, the article
appropriately appeared in the American Political Science Review rather
than a history journal.David Moses
Schneider’s “The Workers’ (Communist) Party and American Trade Unions” (John
Hopkins University, 1927) was the first academic doctoral dissertation on the
subject.[9]Not surprisingly, neither work gave any
attention to espionage.So far as we
know, until the final years of the 1920s Soviet intelligence agencies had only
a transitory and limited presence in the United States.To the extent that agents of Soviet military
intelligence, GRU, or the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB operated in the
U.S., they were largely engaged in low-level industrial espionage and
monitoring (occasionally disrupting) the activities of political and ethnic
refugees who had fled the Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war.[10]The Communist International maintained a
strong presence and Comintern agents used many of the same techniques of
conspiracy and cooperated with Soviet intelligence, but the Comintern largely
engaged in covert political organizing and subversion, not espionage in a
conventional sense.[11]

Until
the late 1950s historically oriented writings by academicians with scholastic
documentation and intended for a scholarly audience such as that of Watkins and
Schneider were few.The story of
American communism was not as yet “history.”Only in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the Fund for the Republic
sponsored the ten-book “Communism in American Life” series did any significant
volume of scholarly books emerge.[12]

The
authors of these pioneering books faced the difficult reality of limited
documentary source material.Little was
available, apart from newspaper stories and the records of congressional
investigations.Formal FBI reports and
statements of findings were used, but not the underlying investigatory files;
those would not be made public until the 1970s and the Freedom of Information
Act.Historians who wanted additional
primary material had to obtain it themselves.Theodore Draper, in particular, was indefatigable: interviewing scores
of ex-Communists, gathering internal party documents from expelled party
leaders like Earl Browder, and rummaging in long-forgotten Communist pamphlets
and publications.Draper, however, was
exceptional in his success in unearthing primary material.A number of the volumes in the series
suffered from the limited availability of archival documentation and the dearth
of supporting monographic studies of particular incidents and controversies.Nonetheless, many of the books uncovered
fascinating material and remain useful as well as pioneering works.In particular, Draper’s two volumes, The
Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia,
laid out the political and organizational history of the CPUSA to 1929 with a
detail and understanding still not surpassed.

Most
of the authors were left-of-center and all shared an anti-Communist
perspective.Many were democratic
socialist or New Deal liberal veterans of bruising battles with Communists and
their allies in trade unions, intellectual organizations and political groups
while some had gone through the CPUSA and learned to distrust it.The only comprehensive one-volume history of
the CPUSA written in this era, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser’s The American
Communist Party: A Critical History, although not part of the same series,
shared its interpretive stance, reflecting the authors’ prior Trotskyist
battles with the staunchly Stalinist CPUSA.Similarly Max Kampelman’s The Communist Party vs. the C.I.O.: A Study
in Power Politics (1957), was not part of the “Communism in American Life”
series but expressed the same sensibility, reflecting Kampelman’s experience in
the late 1940s as a young liberal battling Communists for control of
Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, a thoughtful, poignant 1972
book by Joseph Starobin, former foreign editor of the Daily Worker who
left the CPUSA and took up a new career as an academic historian, adopted a
similar viewpoint.[13]All of these books argued that the American
Communist party was subordinate to the Soviet Union, possessed a totalitarian
ideology, could not by its nature be a ‘normal’ participant in a democratic
polity, and had no legitimate place on the democratic left.

Nonetheless,
the anti-Communist perspective of this pioneering generation of historians of
American communism (whom we term “traditionalists”[14]
for reasons of historiographic simplicity) did not extend, with a few
exceptions we will discuss, to an interest in the links between the CPUSA and
Soviet espionage.Howe and Coser’s
influential The American Communist Party: A Critical History, dismissed
the subject as unworthy of serious attention by devoting all of two sentences
to it, writing:

Since the days of Whittaker
Chambers’ confessions and Alger Hiss’s trial much has been said and written
about the infiltration of American Communists into the Roosevelt
administration.Very probably the extent
of that infiltration has been exaggerated, though there can be little doubt
that Communist spies and agents found their way into the Office of War Information,
the Office of Strategic Services, and the Treasury Department.[15]

And that was the extent of their discussion of the matter.Nor did Starobin discuss espionage, even
though he was writing about an era during which the CPUSA was deeply involved
with Soviet intelligence agencies and several prominent Party officials,
including Browder and Steve Nelson were publicly accused of ties to them.

As
for the “Communism in American Life” series, seven of its ten books ignored the
issue of espionage, in large part due to their focus on aspects of American
communism irrelevant to spying.[16]Three volumes of the series, however, did
take up the issue.David Shannon did not
include a great deal of detail about espionage in The Decline of American
Communism but wrote, “there is overwhelming evidence in the public record
of Soviet espionage in the United States before and after 1945.”He mentioned a number of Soviet spies who had
been convicted, noted either their membership or ideological sympathy for
communism, but cautioned that there was still “no direct connection between the
American Communist Party and espionage for the Soviets.”Shannon admitted that “this is not to say
that there was no link,” only that it was not on the public record.He reproduced a letter he had written to the
FBI seeking information and J. Edgar Hoover’s response citing national security
reasons for not providing any.Shannon concluded
his three-page discussion by commenting that, given the CPUSA’s ideological
fealty to the USSR, it was logical to assume that there were links.[17]

Earl
Latham’s The Communist Controversy in Washington, also part of the
“Communism in American Life” series, discussed the major espionage cases
(Bentley, Hiss-Chambers, Amerasia, the Rosenbergs, and others) of the
1940s and 1950s at length.But Latham
was less concerned about the history of the American Communist movement than
the political controversy in Washington over communism.While he noted growing academic skepticism
about a number of the cases, Latham clearly thought there was substance to the
espionage charges, but he only incidentally linked Soviet espionage with the
CPUSA.The Communist Controversy in
Washington was more a history of political anticommunism and McCarthyism
than of American communism.Additionally, by the time Latham’s book appeared in 1966 the tide had
turned in the academic world, and his acceptance of the validity of many of the
government’s charges about Soviet espionage was falling out of scholarly
fashion

The
other “Communism in American Life” author to deal with espionage was Theodore
Draper.His first volume on the
political and organizational history of the CPUSA, The Roots of American
Communism dealt with the origins and first years of the CPUSA and ended in
the early 1920s.Not surprisingly,
Soviet espionage played no role in this book in as much as the new Soviet state
was as yet hardly in a position to mount intelligence operations in North
America.In his second volume, American
Communism and Soviet Russia, the Communist International loomed large but
Soviet intelligence barely registered, largely a reflection of the minor and
largely transitory operations of Soviet intelligence in the United States.However, at the end of the 1920s Soviet
intelligence agencies began to increase their attention and investment in American
operations, and Draper made note of it.Out of his 534 pages of text, he devoted five and a half pages to
Nicholas Dozenberg, the first American Communist party official known to have
been assigned to Soviet espionage work.The CPUSA handed Dozenberg, then a mid-level party officer, over to the
GRU in late 1927; he worked for Soviet intelligence in the United States and
abroad until 1939 when American authorities arrested him on a false passport
charge; he made a partial confession and was imprisoned for a year.

Draper’s
conclusion to his summary of Dozenberg’s espionage career emphasized that it
was not typical and that it contradicted the major focus of the Party:

Except for a tiny minority,
the Communist membership has devoted its efforts to gaining mass influence with
means that have been blatantly nonconspiratorial.If the Communist movement is regarded as
merely or even primarily a conspiracy, it is paradoxically the most public and
self-publicized conspiracy of all time.

He then, however, made a straightforward observation about recruitment
of spies from the American Communist movement: “a certain type of politically
motivated spy is more likely to be found by Soviet espionage agencies in the
Communist movement than anywhere else.”But, again reacting to polemical charges by right-wing anti-Communists
of the early 1950s, Draper warned against generalizing about this phenomenon:

This simple fact is sometimes
absurdly exaggerated and oversimplified to mean that every non-Russian
Communist should be regarded as at least a “potential” Russian spy.This caricature is based on a theoretical
abstraction, not on the real people who for a multitude of reasons and in
different periods of social stress have gone in and out of the Communist
movement....The Russians could have had
no illusions about the political risks that the imposed on non-Russian
Communist parties by tying them into Russian espionage networks.They recognized the dangers by taking special
precautions to withdraw their agents from party work and by maintaining liaison
with a single member of the Secretariat at the very top of the party
hierarchy.Increasingly they faced the
problem of balancing the benefits that might accrue to Soviet intelligence
agencies from recruiting a few Foreign Communists against the harm that might befall
an entire party if the tie-up were to leak out.[18]

Draper’s remarks, which noted the existence but
minimized the extent and significant of espionage ties between the CPUSA and
Soviet intelligence, served as a guide and model for later historians who
dismissed charges of extensive CPUSA cooperation with Soviet intelligence in
the 1940s.Those who cited or accepted
his judgment, however, often ignored his cautionary words that limited his
observations to a specific time period:

At first the harm far
outweighed the benefits in the Russian estimation.But as the foreign parties lost caste in
Moscow, as the Russian security and intelligence agencies entrenched themselves
in power, and as Stalin felt more sure of himself, the balance shifted in favor
of the benefits that would accrue to the Soviets’ secret agencies.[19]

Draper’s chronological distinction between the CPUSA relationship to
espionage in the period he wrote about, the 1920s, and what followed in the
1930s and 1940s was often overlooked.

Beginning
in the late 1970s a significant number of scholarly essays, doctoral theses,
and books appeared on American Communist history.In part this outpouring of academic interest
was made possible by the growing availability of archival materials such as
personal papers, organizational records, memoirs, and government records made
accessible by the passage of time and the Freedom of Information Act.Additionally, however, a large cohort of
former “New Left” activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s entered the
academic world and a number gravitated to American communist history in hopes
of finding historical answers for the frustrations and failures of their own
political movement, seeking a sense of historical continuity or models for a
renewed radical political agenda.The
interpretive approaches in this new wave of American Communist historiography
were diverse.A few authors criticized
the CPUSA from the left for insufficient revolutionary vigor.[20]Some displayed strong Communist partisanship
and their accounts reflected the CPUSA’s own self-perception of its history,
only in academic dress.[21]

The
predominant stance, however, was benign admiration for the Communist movement
but with enough friendly criticism as to avoid unalloyed partisanship.These “revisionists,” to distinguish them
from Draper and the “Communism in American Life” traditionalists, were fervent
critics of anticommunism.[22]They saw Communists as the key element in the
dynamism of the CIO and the spark behind most of the significant radical and
liberal reform movements of the 1930s.Revisionist scholars produced hundreds of essays and dozens of books on
an astounding array of topics: Communist influence on folk music, drama,
poetry, and various literary figures; Communist activity among Jews, Finns,
Italians, blacks, Mexicans, and Slavs of various sorts; CPUSA support for
sharecroppers in Alabama and Arkansas, grain farmers in Iowa, South Dakota, and
Minnesota, and dairy farmers in New York; Communist influence on social gospel
Protestants, professional social workers, and socially conscious lawyers;
Communist influence in sports; and Communist activities in the labor movement.This body of research demonstrated a
significant Communist role in certain areas of American life, a role once
rarely acknowledged in standard histories of the United States in the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s.[23]

Taken
as a whole, this literature was strong on periphery and weak at the core.Individual Communists working in particular
settings were discussed in detail, while the Communist party itself remained in
the background as only a vague presence.The revisionist literature depicted a Communist movement in which local
autonomy, spontaneity, and initiative were the norm, and orders from the
center, if issued at all, were ignored.This literature often conveyed the impression that there were two
Communist parties.One consisted of the
CPUSA headquarters in New York, to which the revisionists attributed the
regrettable part of Communist history: subordination to Moscow, support for
Stalin‘s purges, the embrace of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, contempt for political
democracy, and a fervent belief in Marxism-Leninism.The other Communist party, the “real” party
in the eyes of the revisionists, consisted of idealistic rank-and-file
Communists who rooted themselves in the wants and needs of the workers inspired
by the populist traditions of the American past, and who paid little attention
to Earl Browder in New York and even less to Joseph Stalin in Moscow.

Most
of the articles and books dealt with a limited geographic area, a small time
span, a single incident, a specific ethnic or racial group, a particular union,
or some other limited aspect of Communist history.Although the revisionist writers claimed that
local Communists habitually disregarded the CPUSA‘s orders, their work did not
provide sufficient evidence to back up this claim.One of the leading revisionists, Maurice
Isserman, acknowledged the misleading impression that could be conveyed by the
multitude of specialized studies: “It would be a mistake to regard the
Communist Party at any point in its history as if it had been simply a
collection of autonomous, overlapping subgroupings of Jews, Finns, blacks,
women, longshoremen, East Bronx tenants and baseball fans, who were free to set
their own political agenda without reference to Soviet priorities.”[24]

Indeed,
the CPUSA was not organized on a congregational basis.In its heyday it was highly centralized, rigidly
disciplined, and run by a full-time paid bureaucracy whose top echelons were
all closely vetted, approved, and, in many cases, hand-picked by Moscow.Most revisionists failed to heed Isserman‘s
sensible note of caution.Throughout the
1980s and into the 1990s, they continued to produce articles and dissertations
in which American Communism was portrayed as an amorphous movement similar to
the chaotic New Left of the late 1960s.

Many
revisionists also took a decidedly (and intentionally) parochial approach to
American Communism.Transnational
historiography was not part of their agenda.Only a few bothered to deal with the links between the CPUSA and the
USSR.Most of the revisionists regarded
Soviet Communism as largely irrelevant to the story of Communism in the United
States.In light of the primacy of the
Soviet Union in the minds of American Communists, the lavish attention devoted
to Soviet affairs in the CPUSA‘s press, and the constant repetition of “lessons”
from the Soviet experience by American party officials and organizers, this
lack of interest in Soviet Communism borders on the bizarre.

Given
their indifference to Soviet-linked matters and their insistence that the
American Communist movement was an expression of native American radicalism and
its ties to the USSR were largely ritualistic, it is not surprising that the
revisionists gave little attention of Soviet espionage.As with several of the books of the
“Communism in American Life” series, some of this lacuna is due to the particular
part of the history of American communism examined.One would hardly expect Soviet espionage to
turn up in Robin Kelley’s book on Communist organizing among black Alabama
sharecroppers.However, while most
revisionist studies were highly localized or pursued a narrow subject, some
took a broader view.Fraser Ottanelli’s The
Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II
and Isserman’s Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During
the Second World War examined the party from 1930 to 1945, including the
period we now know to encompass the most intense Soviet espionage involving the
CPUSA, and both books were silent on the subject.

While
revisionist predominated in the l970s and 1980s, a few historians reasserted a
critical view of the American Communist movement and depicted it as
totalitarian in ideology, antidemocratic in practice, and subordinate to Moscow
in all essential matters.These critical
scholars were often referred to as “traditionalist,” “orthodox,” or
“Draperian.”As representatives of that
school we expressed its central credo in The American Communist Movement:
Storming Heaven Itself:

Every era in the history of
the American Communist movement has been inaugurated by developments in the
Communist world abroad.The Russian
Revolution led to the formation of the first American Communist party.Soviet pressure led to the abandonment of an
underground Communist party.Comintern
directives led American Communists to adopt an ultrarevolutionary posture
during the late 1920s.Soviet foreign
policy needs midwifed the birth of the Popular Front in the mid-1930s.The Nazi-Soviet Pact destroyed the Popular
Front in 1939, and the German attack on the Soviet Union reconstituted it in
1941.The onset of the Cold War cast
American Communists into political purgatory after World War II, and
Khrushchev‘s devastating exposé of Stalin‘s crimes in 1957 tore the American
Communists apart. . . . Within the limits of their knowledge, American
Communists always strove to do what Moscow wanted, no more, no less.[25]

Like the first generation of “traditionalists,” these
latter day traditionalists were ambiguous about the CPUSA’s relationship to
Soviet espionage.Unlike the
revisionists, who were silent or simply dismissive of the subject,
traditionalist historians gave the matter serious but brief attention.Harvey Klehr’s 1984 book, The Heyday of
American Communism: The Depression Decade, discussed the espionage work of
American Communists Nicholas Dozenberg, Juliet Stuart Poyntz, Elizabeth
Bentley, and Whittaker Chambers and noted the involvement of the CPUSA’s
underground arm in obtaining false American passports.But the discussion, while noting CPUSA
involvement in espionage, was short: less than a page in the text of a 511 page
book, although further discussion and elaboration in the endnotes consumed an
additional two pages.[26]

In 1992 we jointly authored a one-volume history of
the CPUSA: The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself.Published just after the Cold War had ended,
just after the USSR had dissolved, and just as the archives in Moscow were
opening, it was our last book of an era that was ending, although at the time
we were unaware of just how drastically the archival environment would change
and the effect it would have on our interpretive stance.We noted the evidence that then existed that
American Communists had assisted Soviet espionage against the United States,
taking two page (cumulative, out of 210) to summarize the espionage charges
that had surfaced involving Juliet Poyntz, the journal Amerasia,
Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony, the Hiss-Chambers affair, and the Rosenberg
trial.We commented that these
“revelations of Soviet espionage” were “usually factual but sometimes given
exaggerated importance.”As to the
relevance of Soviet espionage to the history of the CPUSA, we disputed Louis
Budenz’s charge that every American Communist was a potential spy:

Ideologically, American
Communists owed their first loyalty to the motherland of communism rather than
to the United States but in practice few American Communists were spies.The Soviet Union recruited spies from the
Communist movement, but espionage was not a regular activity of the American
party.The American Communist party
promoted communism and the interests of the Soviet Union through political
means; espionage was the business of the Soviet Union’s intelligence
services.To see the American party
chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of Fifth Column misjudges its
main purpose.

In our conclusion we further remarked, “American communism was not a
secret conspiracy or a clandestine arm of Soviet intelligence, although it had
aspects of both.Espionage was a
sideshow to the party’s main activities, but the periodic surfacing of shadowy
links between American Communists and Soviet intelligence served to confirm in
the public mind the movement’s anti-American character.”[27]We would shortly seriously modify our views.

A New Era

In
1992, the same year that The American Communist Movement appeared,
Harvey Klehr made his first trip to Moscow to examine Comintern records at the
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI).John Earl Haynes followed in January of 1993
to examine CPUSA records at the same archive.We went as historians of American communism.We did not go as historians of Soviet
espionage.Our field, the history of the
American Communist movement, was well separated from the history of Soviet
espionage.Nor did we have any special
interest in espionage or any expectation that we would find records relating to
espionage.

As
we hoped and expected, we found rich and highly useful material on the history
of the American Communist movement in Moscow.The records of the Comintern’s Anglo-American secretariat, its American
commission, and the personal secretariats of Dimitrov, Marty, and Kuusinen as
well as the CPUSA’s own headquarters’ records provided a wealth of primary material
on matters that had long been obscure due to shallow documentation.[28]We also found material we did not expect to
find in the records of the Communist International, including:

(1)
A series of 1943-1945 communications between Pavel Fitin, chief of the foreign
intelligence arm of the KGB, and the Comintern discussing the backgrounds of a
number of American Communists.The
persons Fitin inquired about included many of the persons Elizabeth Bentley
identified as having been member of her CPUSA-based espionage networks that
were turned over to the KGB in 1944.

(2)
Similar communications between the Comintern and Soviet military intelligence,
the GRU, regarding American Communists, including references to a covert CPUSA
group in Washington assigned to “informational work,” a party euphemism for
intelligence gathering of some sort.

(3)
A 1940 report from Earl Browder, chief of the CPUSA, to Georgi Dimitrov of the
Comintern, about an offer of service to the Soviet Union made to Browder by a
senior exiled French politician.A
covering note on the report, which came to Moscow via KGB channels, showed that
Lavrenti Beria, head of the KGB, thought the report important enough to send
copies to Stalin and Molotov.Years
later, British counter-intelligence identified Pierre Cot, the politician in
question, as having been successfully recruited by the KGB in World War
II.

(4)
A 1942 communication via the KGB from Eugene Dennis, the CPUSA’s number two
man, about the insertion of American Communists into the Office of Strategic
Services, the World War II predecessor to the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency.This partially corroborated a
claim by the Communist defector Louis Budenz that Dennis had arranged
infiltration of the OSS and that the infiltrators later worked for Soviet
intelligence.

(5)
A late 1939 order from the Comintern to the CPUSA to identify and turn over to
the Soviets two secret members of the CPUSA who had respectable journalistic or
business cover for clandestine work in Scandinavia in connection with the just
launched Soviet attack on Finland.This
corroborated 1955 testimony by Winston Burdett, then a veteran American
journalist, that early in 1940 as a young reporter and secret Communist he had
been recruited via the CPUSA into Soviet espionage.Burdett testified that using his cover as an
American foreign correspondent he had gone to Sweden and Finland and later
elsewhere in Europe, all the while reporting to the KGB.(Burdett later broke with the Communist
movement and the KGB.)

Keep
in mind that we were not looking for espionage related material: all of these
findings were pure chance.Indeed, we
had paid so little attention to Soviet espionage matters than when we first saw
the messages from Pavel Fitin to Georgi Dimitrov we had no idea who Fitin
was.The messages themselves were on
plan paper without an institutional letterhead, and it was only after we
checked through the indexes of some books on Soviet history that we realized
Fitin was General Fitin of the KGB.

The
subject of one of Fitin’s inquiries, Judith Coplon, also brought an obscure
American code-breaking project known as “Venona” into our research.Coplon, an analyst working in the Foreign
Agents Registration section of the U.S. Justice Department, had been arrested
in 1949 in the act of handing over some of those files to her KGB contact,
Valentine Gubitchev.Tried and convicted
of espionage twice, she escaped punishment when appeals courts voided the
convictions on technical grounds.[29]In his 1986 memoir, retired FBI agent Robert
Lamphere related that the FBI had been alerted that Coplon was a Soviet spy
when the National Security Agency deciphered a 1944 KGB message about her.Lamphere claimed that similar deciphered
messages had led the FBI to identify Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass and Julius
Rosenberg as participants in atomic espionage.But he provided few details about the project.In his 1981 history of American code breaking
journalist David Martin had also discussed a highly secret American project
that had provided key evidence leading to several Soviet spies in the atomic
bomb project, a finding affirmed by historians Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton
in their history of the Rosenberg spy case.Other histories of espionage gave the NSA project a name: Venona.In addition to the Fitin inquiry about
Coplon, the Browder repot on Pierre Cot also connected to Venona.Peter Wright, a retired British MI5 officer,
reported in his 1987 memoir that deciphered messages of the Venona project had
led British security officials to identify Cot as a Soviet agent.[30]

The
Venona-related material in an open Russian archive helped to nudge the American
intelligence community to declassify the Venona material in 1995.Long held in strict secrecy, the Venona
project had been closed down years before.For some time a few intelligence professionals had been pressing to have
the Venona material released, both to enable the NSA and FBI to collect
plaudits for one of the most successful counter-intelligence operations in
American history and to set the historical record straight about Soviet
espionage.In 1995, shortly after our
first book using the Moscow documents, The Secret World of American
Communism, was published, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Democrat, N.Y.)
invited us to testify before the newly established “Commission on Protecting
and Reducing Government Secrecy” which he chaired.During the hearing, we urged release of the
Venona material and Moynihan asked his fellow commissioner John Deutch,
director of the CIA, to look into the matter.

Just
two months after the secrecy commission hearing, the first release of Venona
materials took place at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on July 11,
1995.Over the next two years the
National Security Agency released the remaining messages, about 3,000,
amounting to more that 5,000 pages of text.In 1999 we published Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,
showing that during World War II, Soviet intelligence agencies exploited the
wartime alliance with the United States as an opportunity to launch a
wide-ranging espionage offensive against the U.S.Other researchers also published books based
on the Venona documents with similar conclusions.[31]

Other
writers used the decoded Venona messages along with some sparse KGB material
coming out of Moscow to illuminate specific cases.In Bombshell Joseph Albright and
Marcia Kunstel discussed the atomic espionage of a young Harvard physicist,
Theodore Hall, whose cooperation with the KGB was made public by Venona.Venona also prompted reconsideration of
Elizabeth Bentley.Not one but two
biographies of Bentley appeared: Kathryn Olmsted’s Red Spy Queen: A
Biography of Elizabeth Bentley and Lauren Kessler, Clever Girl:
Elizabeth Bentley’s Life in and Out of Espionage.Both concluded that while in her latter years
she may have embellished occasionally, her testimony regarding Soviet espionage
was largely accurate.[32]

Nor
was Venona the only evidence that emerged on Soviet espionage in the United
States.A slice of KGB material became
public in 1999 with the publication of The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in
America--the Stalin Era, the fruit of a short-lived program whereby the
SVR, Russian successor to the KGB, authorized limited access to the KGB archive
by teaming a western historian, Allen Weinstein, with a former KGB officer,
Alexander Vassiliev.Separately, Vasili
Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist, defected to Great Britain with a treasure
trove of archival notes.Together with
Britain’s leading historian of espionage, Christopher Andrew, he published
The Sword and Shield: the Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of
the KGB.[33]

Venona
as well as the material provided by Vassiliev and Mitrokhin showed the CPUSA
functioning as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence.Venona messages alone identified several
hundred American Communists, including a few highly placed in the government,
who cooperated with Soviet intelligence.They confirmed Bentley’s claims that her espionage networks had originated
as a CPUSA espionage operation. They
reinforced other evidence that most spies were dedicated Communists whose
motive for spying was ideological.Earl
Browder, Eugene Dennis and other senior CPUSA officials were not only aware of
cooperation with Soviet intelligence but supervised it, promoted it, and
ordered subordinate party officers to assist.Browder himself even assisted in recruiting a number of sources for the
Soviets.A 1946 KGB memo credited him
with personal involvement in recruiting eighteen agents for the KGB as well as
additional ones for the GRU.[34]The party assigned senior cadre as liaison
with Soviet intelligence.KGB officers
also met directly with other party officials whenever it was expedient.

The
CPUSA performed a number of tasks for Soviet intelligence.In the 1930s, it ran a very large operation
producing fraudulent American passports for use by the Comintern and Soviet
intelligence agencies.Additionally,
party officials acted as talent spotters, suggesting likely sources and
recruits for Soviet espionage.A large
number of the couriers and sources the KGB and GRU developed in the 1930s and
early 1940s were first brought to the attention of the Soviets by the CPUSA.When the KGB targeted someone as a possible
recruit, it often called upon the CPUSA to assist in vetting the potential
agent by providing background information and personal data Soviet intelligence
wanted in order to evaluate a possible agent.The CPUSA also furnished safe houses: apartments and homes of Communists
where KGB officers could meet privately with their sources and couriers for
lengthy debriefings.Additionally, the
CPUSA arranged American business fronts for Soviet intelligence officers operating
throughout the world.Using secret
members of the party who worked for various American corporations, KGB and GRU
officers roamed the world with credentials as salesmen for American
photographic supply and electronic equipment companies, commercial agents for
American import/export firms, and as talent scouts for Hollywood movie
studios.The CPUSA’s work as an
auxiliary to Soviet intelligence acted as a “force multiplier,” to use an
American military term.The party
relieved professional Soviet intelligence officers of many espionage tasks that
were necessary and vital but time-consuming, tedious, and routine and allowed
the professional spies to maximize their time on high productivity espionage
tasks.

After
Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the CPUSA moved beyond its role
as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence to undertaking actual espionage
operations under its own supervision.Jacob Golos, the chief liaison between the party and the KGB, organized
several large networks of secret Communists who worked as mid-level officials
in a variety of U.S. government agencies in Washington.These networks sought out military,
diplomatic, and political information of interest to the Soviets.Golos' assistant and courier, Elizabeth
Bentley, collected the information and Golos then passed it to the KGB,
although he also gave his party superior and old friend, Earl Browder, copies
of political information of interest to the CPUSA itself.

The
KGB was not entirely happy that so extensive a portion of its operations in
America was outside of its direct control.But Stalin’s purge of his security services in the late 1930s had
eliminated most of the professional intelligence officers who had worked in the
United States and had created an impressive array of sources and networks.In the early 1940s the Soviet services had to
send new officers, young and inexperienced, to America to resume contact with
these sources and rebuild the abandoned networks.Added to the tremendous increase in workload
caused by the onset of war, these self-inflicted wounds had severely
overburdened Soviet intelligence.Under
the circumstances both the KGB and GRU welcomed all the help they could get
from Golos and the CPUSA.They might
quibble and worry about violations of ideal espionage tradecraft but were not
in position to do much more.Further,
Golos himself had been a pre-revolutionary Bolshevik and had long-standing ties
to the KGB, earning him a measure of trust.By the end of 1943, however, the KGB and GRU stations in the U.S. were
fully staffed, their officers had gained experience working in America, and
they set about bringing his networks under direct professional Soviet
control.When Golos died of a heart
attack in late 1943, his assistant, Elizabeth Bentley, came under increasing
pressure to turn his sources over to the KGB; by the end of 1944 she had been
pushed aside and the CPUSA-based networks Golos and she had built had all been
shifted to direct KGB control.[35]

By
the late 1990s the new evidence of American Communist complicity with Soviet
espionage was so overwhelming that it was obvious that our 1992 view that
“espionage was not a regular activity of the American party” and was no more
than a “sideshow” to the party’s history needed serious revision.In Venona, we stated our revised view
as follows:

as we read the deciphered
messages showing that regional CPUSA officials, members of the party’s most
powerful body, the Politburo, and the party chief himself knowingly and
purposely assisted Soviet spies, it became clear that espionage was a regular
activity of the American Communist party.To say that the CPUSA was nothing but a Soviet fifth column in the Cold
War would be an exaggeration; it still remains true that the CPUSA’s chief task
was the promotion of communism and the interests of the Soviet Union through
political means.But, it is equally true
that the CPUSA was indeed a fifth column working inside and against the United
States in the Cold War.[36]

Despite the enormous risks involved, the CPUSA leadership was willing
and eager to devote significant resources and their own political and legal
lives to the service of Soviet intelligence.

Nor
were we the only historians of American communism who had to partially retool
themselves into historians of espionage in order to integrate the espionage
story into the CPUSA’s history.James
Ryan’s 1981 dissertation on the life of Earl Browder gave little attention to
the matter of espionage.But when Ryan’s
book version appeared in 1997 he had been to the Moscow archives and Venona
messages had started to be released.Espionage, nearly ignored in the 1981 dissertation, now received serious
attention.And in 2002, with Venona and
Vassiliev’s material available, Ryan published an essay, “Socialist Triumph as
a Family Value: Earl Browder and Soviet Espionage” that focused on Browder’s
role in Soviet espionage.Similarly,
Vernon Pedersen whose writing in the 1980s gave scant attention to espionage,
in his 2001 history of the CPUSA in the state of Maryland integrated into it
the involvement of Maryland party cadre in espionage activities of Whittaker
Chambers in Washington in the mid-1930s.[37]

The
most prominent revisionist, Maurice Isserman, also recognized the need to
integrate espionage into the history of the CPUSA.He initially expected that the revelations
from the Russian archives required only limited modification of his prior
views.“For my own part,” he wrote,
“what has always interested me in the history of the C.P.U.S.A. had been the
conflict between the ‘democratic, populist, and revolutionary’ beliefs of
individual Communists, and its decidedly undemocratic purposes and conduct
imposed on the party from abroad.” (Emphasis in original.)Reviewing The Secret World of American
Communism in 1995, Isserman thought it demonstrated only “ad hoc,
amateurish and sporadic” participation in Soviet espionage by American
Communists and believed that we had confused the party’s clandestine efforts to
protect itself from government infiltrators with espionage.[38]But as more information appeared, he adjusted
his views, and in 1999 noted that the new evidence makes “it abundantly clear
that the Soviet Union recruited most of its spies in the United States in the
years leading up to and during World War II from the ranks of the Communist
Party or among its close sympathizers -- an effort in which top party leaders
were intimately involved.”[39]By this he still didn’t mean he was adopting
the traditionalist position.Rather, he
indicated:

The “new” history of American
Communism and what might be called the new history of Communist espionage need
not be mutually exclusive, let alone antagonistic, historical inquiries.If this reviewer were to rewrite “Which Side
Were You On?” today [his 1992 book], it would certainly be influenced by the revelations
contained in books like “Venona” and “The Haunted Wood.”By the same token, some of the concerns and
themes raised by the new history of American Communism are not irrelevant to
those who seek to decipher the mixture of faith and breach of faith that
created a romance of the clandestine among some American Communists during
World War II.[40]

Taking his own advice, Isserman wrote an essay
entitled “Disloyalty as a Principle: Why Communists Spied.”Coming, as this did from a historian whose
book on American Communists in World War II had nothing on espionage, it
represented an honest and commendable attempt to grapple with the evidence and
integrate espionage into the history of American communism.He sketched out two different types of
Communist loyalties that provided motives for spying, represented respectively
by Peggy Dennis and Walter Bernstein.Dennis, a lifelong Communist militant and wife of Gene Dennis (head of
the party from 1945 to 1959), was never a spy.But her commitment to the USSR was typical of one kind of Communist, as
Isserman wrote: “the Soviet Union was her real homeland, while life in the
United States was a kind of unfortunate exile she had to endure until the great
day came when American workers overthrew their own oppressors.”Isserman illustrated a second type of
Communist loyalty with a quotation from screenwriter and party member Walter
Bernstein: “I believed in antifascism and international solidarity and
brotherhood and the liberation of man, and the Soviet Union stood for all of
these. . . . I was in the grip of a new kind of patriotism, one that
transcended borders and unified disparate peoples.”Isserman was inclined to think that most of
those recruited to espionage were motivated by such a “romantic anti-fascism.”[41]

Ellen Schrecker, author of a number of revisionist
books on McCarthyism and anticommunism acknowledged, “it is clear that some
kind of espionage took place during the 1930s and 1940s” and “as the evidence
accumulates, it does seem as if many of the alleged spies had, indeed, helped
the Russians” and allowed that most of the spies were Communists.But then she wondered:

Were these activities so
awful?Was the espionage, which
unquestionably occurred, such a serious threat to the nation’s security that it
required the development of a politically repressive internal security
system?It may be useful to take a more
nuanced position and go beyond the question of guilt or innocence to ascertain
not only how dangerous the transmission of unauthorized information was, but
also why it occurred.Because espionage
is an issue that carries such heavy emotional freight, it is usually treated in
a monolithic way that overlooks distinctions between different types of spying
and different types of spies.

She then provided a rational that accepted the self-justifying motives
that both the spies and the CPUSA itself would have found congenial:

The men and women who gave
information to Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s did so for political, not
pecuniary reasons.They were already
committed to Communism and they viewed what they were doing as their
contribution to the cause . . . [and] it is important to realize that as
Communists these people did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism;
they were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national
boundaries.They thought they were
“building . . . a better world for the masses,” not betraying their country.[42]

What Schrecker’s apologia for Soviet espionage
illustrates, however, is that the integration of the story of Soviet espionage
into the history of domestic American communism also requires integrating it
into the history of domestic American anticommunism.The days when historians could dismiss public
and government concern about Communist espionage as manufactured hysteria about
something that did not exist are gone.

There are still historians who have refused to accept
the new evidence about espionage either on the entirely unsupported grounds
that the Venona messages and similar evidence are forgeries or CIA
disinformation or on the basis of tortured and improbable readings of the
documents themselves.The former are cranks
whose conspiracy theories discredit themselves.The latter include James Boughton, official historian of the
International Monetary Fund, and Roger Sandilands of Strathclyde University who
have ardently defended Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie in the face of
clear and convincing documentary evidence of their espionage on behalf of the
Soviet Union.[43]

The new evidence neither justifies nor excuses the
excesses of domestic American anticommunism ordinarily subsumed under the label
McCarthyism.[44]But it does require a more complex and
nuanced understanding of domestic American anticommunism than many historians
in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were willing to provide.It means separating sensible, rational, and
entirely justifiable anticommunism and internal security policies from genuine
excesses such as the fervid partisan charges by Senator McCarthy that Secretary
of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense George Marshall were part of a
Communist conspiracy.

We are not the only historians who feel that the new
evidence of CPUSA participation in Soviet espionage requires a rethinking of
the history of domestic anticommunism and the long civil war within liberalism
over the matter.David Plotke, an
historian of American liberalism[45]
recognized that it impacted his field in an interesting progression of reviews
of our books.He agreed that in The
Secret World of American Communism we had demonstrated “the political
dishonesty of the CPUSA, its uncritical dependence on the Soviet leadership,
and its hostility to democratic norms.”But he thought, “the effort to indict individuals and especially the CPUSA
as an organization for criminal conspiracy [in regard links to Soviet
intelligence] is on balance not successful.”We were guilty of using evidence in “a naive way” and while “future
research may prove them [us] right … in trying to make their strongest charges
stick, the authors reach too far.”[46]

A subsequent review of The Soviet World of American
Communism had a change in tone and commented that we “make their [our]
point powerfully” and “the reliance of the CPUSA on Soviet political leadership
was indiscriminate,” consequently “the ferocious and unquestioning attachment
of CPUSA leaders to their Soviet allies makes espionage appear more
comprehensible.”[47]Next reviewing Venona: Decoding Soviet
Espionage in America, Plotke wrote, “the authors provide enough evidence”
to “change one’s view of the character of American communism” and “Venona and
the authors’ prior volumes have changed the debate about American
communism.”He commented, “evidence for
substantial Communist involvement in Soviet espionage during the Poplar Front
years . . . suggest that Popular Frontism was a partial, cynical, and
unprincipled shift by CPUSA leaders.Venona thus links the spectacular post-World War II failures of the
communist left in the United States to its shallow and opportunistic notions of
popular democratic politics” and “Venona causes problems for any effort to
identify and honor a distinct Popular Front Left whose rejection of American
policies was judicious and independent.”He went on to observe that it “raises important issues that are
contemporary as well as historical” and cited the need to consider what it
meant for McCarthyism and “the reluctance of the post-Vietnam Left to recognize
the extent of CPUSA corruption.”[48]

Conclusion

The once widely separated historiographies of Soviet
espionage and American communism have moved closer together.Historians of domestic American communism and
anticommunism must grapple with the CPUSA’s deep involvement with Soviet
espionage being part of the story.Not, of course, the whole story or even most of the story,
but very definitely a significant part of the story.And more broadly, historians of American
politics in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s have to reconsider what was at stake in
the civil war within liberalism in the late 1940s over the role of Communists
and Popular Front liberals in the New Deal coalition as well as the context of
the politics of anticommunism in that era.

Similarly, historians of espionage need to broaden the
scope of their study to encompass the era prior to what one might call the
“high Cold War” of the 1950s and later, when espionage was largely the business
of professionals.In the 1920s, 1930s
and early 1940s there was a fuzzy overlap between clandestine Comintern and
CPUSA political work and KGB and GRU espionage.Communists, many with no training as professional intelligence officers,
moved back and forth between open party work, covert subversion, and secret
intelligence operations.The firewalls
erected by professional intelligence officers in the 1950s between Communist
party activities and Soviet intelligence did not exist.

This process has already begun.Andrew and Mitrokhin’s The Sword and the
Shield, is a book on Soviet espionage, not Communist history, but noted the
quantitative and qualitative difference that occurred in Soviet intelligence
operations when American security agency pressure on the CPUSA in the 1940s
forced it out of the espionage business.Katherine Sibley’s 2004 Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the
Dawn of the Cold War gave party officials such as Steve Nelson a major
role.And Steve Usdin emphasized the
centrality of the Communist party and Communist ideology in his story of the
espionage careers of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, two electrical engineers in
Julius Rosenberg’s espionage apparatus in Engineering Communism.Usdin demonstrated that Rosenberg and other
members of his apparatus were not professional intelligence officers or even
recruited by professional intelligence officers, but enthusiastic Communist
amateurs who only later came under KGB supervision.[49]

The evidence of Communist espionage that has become
available since 1992 has not by any measure been fully digested or comprehended
by historians.And additional new
archival evidence becomes available every year.This is a field where much remains to be learned and much remains to be
debated and discussed.

[1]. For a comprehensive bibliography of this literature,
see chapter 30, “Espionage,” of the on-line “American Communism and
Anticommunism: A Historian’s Bibliography and Guide to the Literature” (2005)
at: < http://johnearlhaynes.org/page94.html >.

[3]. David J. Dallin, Soviet Espionage (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1955).Dallin and
Boris Nicolaevsky’s 1947 Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale
University Press) had been a pioneering study of the Soviet labor camp system,
well received in the academic world at the time, but again in 1960s it was
retroactivley discredited among most American scholars due to its use of
defector testimony and Dallin’s Menshevick origins.Indeed, Dallin and Nicolaevsky’ 1947 book was
so thorough erased from American academic memory that the appearance of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the mid-1970s came as
a unexpected shock.

[4]. Herbert L. Packer, Ex-Communist Witnesses: Four
Studies in Fact Finding (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1962), 222; David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under
Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 56.Caute was a journalist and writer rather than
a professional historian, nonetheless The Great Fear had a detailed
scholarly apparatus and was widely used as a text and source by American
scholars. Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover
and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1988), 222, 250.

[6]. Among Theoharis’s other works that minimize Soviet
espionage and any link with the CPUSA are: Athan G. Theoharis, Seeds of
Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1971); Athan G Theoharis, “The Truman Administration and the
Decline of Civil Liberties: The FBI’s Success in Securing Authorization for a
Preventive Detention Program,” Journal of American History 64,
no. 4 (March 1978); Athan G. Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political
Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1978) Athan Theoharis, “FBI Surveillance During the Cold War
Years: A Constitutional Crisis,” Public Historian 3 (Winter
1981): 4–14; Athan G. Theoharis, ed., The Truman Presidency: The
Origins of the Imperial Presidency and the National Security State, ed.
Athan G. Theoharis (Stanfordville, N.Y.: E.M. Coleman Enterprises, 1979).Two books that Thoharis edited also brought
together more than a dozen American academics who shared the view that Soviet
espionage was minimal and American Communists had little to do with it:Robert Griffith and Athan G. Theoharis, eds.,
The Specter; Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism
(New York: New Viewpoints, 1974); Athan G. Theoharis, ed., Beyond the Hiss
Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1982).Two of the many books with
a similar approach are: Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R.
McCarthy and the Senate (Lexington: Published for the Organization of
American Historians by University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Alan D. Harper, The
Politics of Loyalty: The White House and the Communist Issue, 1946–1952
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pub. Corp., 1969).

[8]. There were a number of polemical or journalistic non-scholarly
defenses of Hiss or the Rosenbergs:Fred
J. Cook, The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss (New York: Morrow, 1958), a
book-length polemic by a far-left journalist arguing that Hiss was innocent of
all charges; Alger Hiss, In the Court of Public Opinion (New York: A.A.
Knopf, 1957), Hiss’s own brief for the defense that takes a legalistic approach
more concerned about the admissibility of evidence than the validity of the
evidence and refrains from offering a counter-narrative to that of Chambers; William
Allen Jowitt, The Strange Case of Alger Hiss (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1953), by a British jurist who adopts the role of advocate for the
defense and argues that the evidence against Hiss was perjured or faked; and
John Chabot Smith, Alger Hiss: The True Story (New York: Penguin Books,
1977), a journalist who maintains that Hiss was innocent and advances a number
of possible conspiracies, several contradictory, to account for the evidence
against Hiss.The only comprehensive
examination of the evidence on the Hiss case comparable to that which Weinstein
provided was by the writer Sam Tanenhaus whose biography of Whittaker Chambers
also concluded that Hiss was guilty, Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A
Biography (New York: Random House, 1997).The principle Rosenberg defense book was Walter Schneir and Miriam
Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965),
by two hard left journalists.

[9]. Gordon S. Watkins, “Revolutionary Communism in the
United States,” American Political Science Review 14, no. 1
(February 1920); David Moses Schneider, “The Workers’ (Communist) Party and
American Trade Unions” (dissertation (1927) published as a book, Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins Press, 1928).

[10]. The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti or
Committee for State Security) and its foreign intelligence arm have a complex
organizational history.The predecessors
to the KGB, which came into existence in 1954, include the Cheka (All-Russian
Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage), GPU (State
Political Directorate), OGPU (United State Political Directorate), NKVD (People’s
Commissariat of Internal Affairs), GUGB (Main Administration of State
Security), NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security), MGB (Ministry of
State Security), KI (Committee of Information), and MVD (Ministry of Internal
Affairs).For simplicity, throughout
this paper the term KGB will be used to designate these various predecessor
organizations.Similary, the foreign
intelligence arm of Red Army and, later, Soviet Army military intelligence will
be referred to as the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye or Chief
Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff).To make it more complicated, 1937-1938 and
again in 1947-1949, GRU and KGB were briefly merged.

[11]. On the ties and overlaps between Comintern covert
operations and Soviet intelligence, see David McKnight, Espionage and the
Roots of the Cold War: The Conspiratorial Heritage (Portland, OR: Frank
Cass, 2002).

[12]. The Fund for the Republic was a private foundation
headed by the former president of the University of Chicago, Robert
Hutchins.The books of the series are:
Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking
Press, 1957); Robert W. Iversen, The Communists & the Schools (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959); David A. Shannon, The Decline of American
Communism: A History of the Communist Party of the United States Since 1945
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959); Theodore Draper, American Communism and
Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960); Clinton Lawrence Rossiter, Marxism:
The View from America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960); Ralph Lord Roy, Communism
and the Churches (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960); Nathan Glazer, The
Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961); Frank
S. Meyer, The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre.
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961); Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left:
Episodes in American Literary Communism. (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1961); Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the
New Deal to McCarthy. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).

[16]. Draper, Roots; Glazer, Social Basis;
Aaron, Writers; Glazer, Social Basis Iversen, Schools;
Rossiter, Marxism; Roy, Churches; Meyer, Moulding.Kampelman, writing about the role of
Communists in the CIO, also had little reason to consider the issue.

[20]. See, for example, Staughton Lynd, “The Possibility
of Radicalism in the Early 1930s: The Case of Steel,” Radical America 6
(December 1972); John Gerassi, “The Comintern, the Fronts, and the CPUSA,” in New
Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, in New Studies in
the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael E. Brown, et al.
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993).

[22]. The one exception to this is a small body of
Trotskyist-oriented historians who accept the Trotskyist critique of
Stalinism.See, for example, Bryan D.
Palmer, “Rethinking the Historiography of United States Communism,” American
Communist History 2, no. 2 (Winter 2003).

[23]. Among the major revisionist works are: Maurice
Isserman, Which Side Were You on? the American Communist Party During the
Second World War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982);
Harvey A. Levenstein, Communism, Anti-Communism, and the CIO (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led
Unions (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Fraser M.
Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to
World War II (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Paul Lyons, Philadelphia
Communists, 1936–1956 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Mark
Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1983); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama
Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1990); Michael E. Brown, et al., New Studies in the Politics
and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993).On the revisionist view of the
historiography, see: Maurice Isserman, “Three Generations: Historians View
American Communism,” Labor History 26, no. 4 (Fall
1985): 517–45.

[28]. With this material we produced two books, Harvey
Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of
American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and Harvey
Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of
American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).Additionally, we arranged for the U.S.
Library of Congress to microfilm the CPUSA records (fond 515) for placement at
the Library of Congress and other major American research libraries for
research use.We also assisted in the
Library of Congress joining the Incomka Project for the digitalization of
Comintern records, including those of the Anglo-American secretariat, and their
availability at the Library of Congress and other institutions.The results have been renewed vigor in the
history of American communism with scores of new books, essays, theses, and
dissertations appearing.The
historiographic debate has also been drastically altered with the
traditionalist interpretation that we espouse tremendously strengthened while
revisionist views have been chastened.But that historiographic debate is not the subject of this paper and can
be followed elsewhere: Haynes, “The Cold War Debate Continues” and John Earl
Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage
(San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2003).

[29]. The opinion of one of the appeals court noted that
while legal rules required the conviction be voided, Coplon’s “guilt was
plain.”

[35]. On the CPUSA’s role in Soviet espionage see: John
Earl Haynes, “The American Communist Party as an Auxiliary to Espionage: From
Asset to Liability,” paper presented at 2005 Raleigh International Spy
Conference[http://www.raleighspyconference.com/news/news_11–11–05.aspx] (Raleigh,
NC, 2005).

[37]. James Ryan, “Earl Browder and American Communism at
High Tide: 1934–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre
Dame, 1981); James G. Ryan, Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism
(Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1997); James G. Ryan,
“Socialist Triumph as a Family Value: Earl Browder and Soviet Espionage,” American
Communist History 1, no. 2 (December 2002); Vernon L. Pedersen, The
Communist Party in Maryland, 1919–57 (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2001).

[44]. Harvey Klehr, “Was Joe McCarthy Right?” paper
presented at 2005 Raleigh International Spy Conference[http://www.raleighspyconference.com/news/news_11–11–05.aspx] (Raleigh,
NC, 2005).See also John Earl Haynes and
Harvey Klehr, “Soviet Espionage and Communist Subversion in the United States
in the Early Cold War: What Do We Know?” paper presented atEisenhower Center for American Studies
“McCarthyism in America” conference (National Archives, Washington, D.C., 2000).

[45]. Plotke is the author of: David Plotke, Building a
Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and
1940s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[46]. David Plotke, “Review of The Secret World of
American Communism,” Political Science Quarterly 111,
no. 4 (Winter 1996–97): 730–32.

[47]. David Plotke, “Review of The Soviet World of
American Communism,” Political Science Quarterly 114,
no. 1 (Spring 1999): 173–75.